skullgiver

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the science is out on that. For instance, your capacity to fall in love with someone is influenced by their smell as it contains information about their immune system (and, by extent, their immunological compatibility with yours).

  Most humans have a need for companionship. It’s the reason solitary confinement is considered torture in most cases. Our brains and bodies are rigged to prefer companionship over being alone most of the time. Put a human alone in a room with a plastic ball with a face drawn on it for long enough, and that plastic ball will be given a name, a personality, and that human will get upset if you dare “hurt” the plastic ball. In a much more dystopian twist on that experiment, people have started “befriending” LLMs now that they’ve grown to have the ability to remember a couple hundred keywords about your user account. The human mind craves being around others.

  However, I don’t think whether you like someone or not is purely a function of what they provide for you. You can enjoy the presence of your friends even if you’re sitting in a room silently scrolling on your phone, or watching a TV show.

  Their opinions and behaviour towards others definitely also matters. Shared experiences also factor into this stuff somewhere; someone you would normally detest who might’ve been with you through bad times/some traumatic event might end up becoming a friend. Years and years of positive experiences can also make you find excuses for things you would reject in others (which is why even the worst people can have their families and friends protect them). Your friends may have turned into terrible people over the years, and you will find ways to defend their behaviour to yourself and others just because they’re your friends. Similarly, someone you know well might do something terrible out of the blue, and you will recognise that as an outlier event (mental health crisis? sign of illness?) rather than distancing yourself from them like they’re some weirdo in the street.

  Maybe ask yourself this: if your friends got hit by a car tomorrow, and suddenly lost their ability to hold an interesting conversation, make witty jokes, or play video games with you, would you stop caring about them? If not, then there’s clearly more to your relationship with them than the basic experiences they can provide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Royal Fuckup⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think most Europeans would think their royals are classy at all. Even if we stripped them of their power now they’d just be rich people living in large houses their family could already afford anyway. They’re basically government pawns we keep around for tradition and to make deals with vain foreign leaders. China does something similar, but they used pandas. If you’re a good little friend of the totalitarians, you get to have a panda in your zoo.

  You think the leaders of shit holes are going to be interested in presidents? Nah, they meet presidents every day. If you want to placate them, you take our the big guns. You go “Who’s a big boy president? That’s right, it’s you! You can have a sleepover in a real palace just like in the Disney movies! Everyone thinks you’re such an important big boy!” These leaders aren’t rational-thinking, they’re coming from (sub)cultures where displays of wealth and status mean something, and I bet nothing makes a vain guy happier than to say they made a king entertain them. They feel like they’re such big shits pushing around our stage puppets.

  You’d think those foreign leaders would feel belittled but sending royalty to shitholes works great, politically. The national news broadcaster has this trick where they’re officially “royal Dutch news” (because of weird laws, you don’t need to be related to royalty in any way to be granted that title as a company) and yelling “royal Dutch news” instead of “Dutch news” when trying to ask questions actually works. Even in countries with presidents. It’s extremely stupid but it’s been proven to work.

  I don’t think the royals are anything special but I also don’t think the political circus around electing a president and the endless drama that follows will be any cheaper (or better, for that matter). With the way things are going in this country, I’ll take King Wimlex over President Wilders, thank you very much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see why not. Based on the spec, a server submits a request signed by a keyId which the receiving server caches or obtains, but the new server is also queried for the keys belonging to the actor. You cannot reuse the old key IDs (probably) because it’ll stay in the cache, but you can just add new keys of your own.

  Step 10 of the key verification algorithm explicitly instruct the server to ignore the old key and fetch a new one, in case the other server has done a blind key rotation.

  In other words, the ActivityPub spec only verifies that an account was the source of a message at the time a server submitted or forwarded an event. It does not validate that an Update with new text contents belongs to the same server that once Created the object.

  Of course, I expect ActivitiyPub software to (mis)implement this spec in different ways. Some software will be protected against domain hijacking, others will leave domains once registered completely useless in the future for common actor names in ActivityPub.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There is, but the protocol is designed that you can’t buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Note that because of the way federation works, the domain can be bought by someone else who can then use the connections and links to lemm.ee images and posts to peddle spam and other nonsense. It’s not a problem as long as the domain name stays under control of the lemm.ee admins, but if they don’t renew their registration then anyone can pretend to be the old lemm.ee server.

  Best for lemm.ee users to delete images from their posts and comments now so whoever grabs the domain in a year or so can’t use it to inject weird shit into your old posts as easily. Of course they still can create new accounts for all.the old account names and post in your name if they want, but the user private keys should prevent that for individual posts if the other server software is smart enough to validate them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spicy food never affects my gut and everyone thinks it's really weird. How unusual is this and what could be happening to explain why spicy food doesn't affect me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don’t really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won’t do more than make you pee.

  The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it’s poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.

  Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn’t change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So far the only companies making you use one are the multiplayer gaming companies that are using TPMs for hardware IDs to ban cheaters and expensive corporate software using them for remote attestation on hardware the company owns.

  If you’re salty about the whole Windows 10 thing, you’ve got until at least October 2027 until Microsoft drops support for it (security beyond the 10 year window announced at the launch of Windows 10 cost like 5 bucks a month though) or you can install an OS from someone who’s still willing to maintain support for old hardware, like Google’s ChromeOS or maybe Linux.

  It’s only really a problem if you’re unwilling to pay for (or pirate) updates and are afraid to separate yourself from the large corporations building your current OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people delete their posts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

  Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

  There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Is the Perfect Show for Trekkies — Now They Need to Watch It⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh, TIL SkyShowtime exists. Yet another streaming service, great! I’ll have to consider it when SNW continues.

  According to the internet it won’t work on my computer or laptop, though, because unlike Netflix and Disney Plus it doesn’t support Linux apparently? And it doesn’t seem like it’ll work on my phone, either, because I’ve had to flash a custom ROM onto that after Xiaomi dropped support a few years ago. Guess I’ll have to try a free trial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] Never change, lemmy.ml⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Criticism of communism on Lemmy is like criticising the far right on Truth Social. Whether or arguments are good or not (“communists are basically nazis” just isn’t true), you’re criticising ideals on a platform mostly set up for people disenfranchised for those ideals.

  While I don’t exactly agree with your comment, I find it quite ridiculous that your comment was removed. Just let the downvotes do their job, this didn’t need mod intervention.

  It’s quite unfortunate that so many normal people and communities have concentrated on .ml, unlike Lemmygrad you can’t really defederate .ml without missing out on valuable interaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its most common use case is interrupting games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Read the popup dialogue next time. It tells you what Sticky Keys is for and how to disable the trigger if you don’t want it.

  Or go to settings > accessibility > sticky keys > “keyboard shortcut for sticky keys”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its most common use case is interrupting games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Various diseases and disabilities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, if you misinterpret this question, you’ll probably get the next one. The important thing about these is that you shouldn’t overthink them, they’re not worth the mental effort and they don’t expect serious dedication from you anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The nuance is the entire point of the CAPTCHA. It’s not really hard to go “inside warmer than snowy outside” but I imagine whole groups of neurodivergent people will be getting locked out by these.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly the type of thing a bot sucks at. Training image recognition or text recognition is trivial. Training concepts such as perceived temperature requires state of the art LLMs.

  This isn’t the only question, of course. It’ll stick around until bots are trained for temperature. Then it’ll ask “which of these would make a good picnic spot” or “which of these are big enough to contain an apple”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  To kick out bots. AI can bypass normal CAPTCHAs better than humans can, so “select the traffic light” and “type these letters” won’t work anymore.

  Now CAPTCHAs are becoming a test in actual mental capacity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨this⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  User friendly CAPTCHAs have been defeated. Current technology relies on extensive fingerprinting but if you want to take out bots using that, you’ll also be taking out anyone not on Windows 10+/macOS with GPU drivers installed and no fingerprint resistence.

  “Type these letters” is no longer a good filter. Neither is basic math or recognising words. Even these dice games can be done by ChatGPT just fine once you bypass the “I can’t do CAPTCHAs” limitation that they put in front of it.

  We used to be able to make CAPTCHAs just slightly more difficult. Add in some colours, blur the edges some more, use different fonts. That’s no longer an option; CAPTCHAs need to be increased in cognitive complexity instead.

  This is a huge problem. As AI becomes more advanced, more disabled people will start losing access to services because they can’t get through the CAPTCHAs. Audio transcription AI is becoming more advanced by the month and I expect audio CAPTCHAs to soon become unusable. These more complex puzzles, which AI can’t automatically describe, will also cause sighted and mentally disabled people to lose access. The days of CAPTCHAs are soon over.

  I can see three solutions for this, and all of the suck donkeyballs.

  One is remote attestation tied to a hardware key (the thing Google tried to add and the thing Apple has added to Safari). Your access will be determined by your possession of real hardware. If someone hacks the manufacturer of your device and steals the keys, your access will soon be revoked. However, this requires bots to buy real devices, which makes them too costly to operate at huge scales. Running Linux or older versions of Windows/macOS will make accessing the internet impossible.

  A variant of this is the “apps for everything” outcome, where websites will stop being useful and tell you to install an app instead. Apps can do a lot more (invasive) analysis of your system, and existing DRM solutions should keep most bots out.

  Another is to just put pay walls and accounts in front of everything. No spam bot or crawler will pay a dollar for every account they need to create.

  The last one is to centralise on a few hosting providers which can use traffic analysis across many websites to determine bot status. No more VPNs, even more websites behind Cloudflare, but simple, accessible CAPTCHAs.

  The non-solution is to try and cling to CAPTCHAs. Soon CAPTCHAs will start excluding anyone under some kind of education level that’ll affect a significant portion of the population, but it’ll maintain the status quo for most neurotypical people.

  Many websites already employ a combination of these measures, and it’s only going to get worse. For general accessibility and for keeping the internet free and somewhat democratic, I’m putting my money on option one: remote attestation. Hardware trust can be implemented in free operating systems (many people will get huffy about it but I’m sure they’ll prefer it to not being able to use the internet) and older systems will take a hit, but it’s the best of the outcomes I can see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignoring the reboot doesn’t work when it’s a reboot to the Nvidia driver, as I’ve found out. The displays will work but Vulkan/OpenGL will break in confusing ways with error messages that point in the wrong direction.

  I don’t really understand why more Linux don’t hot replace the kernel, Ubuntu can do it and so can a bunch of enterprise Linux variants. I assume there’s some kind of design limitation that prevents other distros from using that API.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  These issues are common for people running bleeding edge Linux like me, it’s just something you accept when you use code that was finished a week ago rather than wait for it to be tested for stability for months like most Windows code.

  You don’t get that stuff on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora, or course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay fresh⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Image A excellent shit post

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You say that, but Discord will happily refuse to open until you download the latest .deb file from their website, and it’s one of the friendlier Electron applications in terms of in-window updating in my experience.

  I had to disable my adblock to get the Teams application to show me a button I needed at some point…

  One interesting thing I’ve heard from people I’ve introduced into Linux is that you need to reboot an awful lot. It has to do with automatic security updates triggering a reboot-required flag, but every other day I get a popup with “updates were installed, you should reboot”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t remember any version of Windows I actively use ever auto updating for me either, but that’s because I turned that shit off myself. I had a test VM reboot itself at some point, but it recovered itself perfectly so I only noticed it because the open Firefox tabs all appeared to have unloaded by themselves.

  You don’t need to know any programming languages to use Linux, and if you’re a nornal computer user and buy a Mac you don’t need to compile anything either. You’re also free from Microsoft’s stupid advertising and Edge sabotage.

  I’ll have you know the reason why my laptop didn’t display over a dock isn’t because of bingbong-SDK, but rather because Linux 6.1 altered a kernel API that evdi 1.14 didn’t support, hence breaking the DisplayLink driver written by Synaptic, thank you very much. But yeah, this stuff does happen occasionally and it sucks. But hey, the problem wasn’t Nvidia’s terrible software for once!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are 144hz screen possible?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, and that’s why European Youtubers will sometimes upload video in 4k@50fps (because the grid frequency in Europe is 50Hz instead, and that’s what a lot of cameras are configured for to prevent banding).

  Syncing with the power grid is one of those great ideas that lead to some very silly side effects, like that time the grid frequency in Europe sagged for a while and everyone’s alarm clocks started drifting. Grid operators increased the frequency slightly over the following months to correct the clocks as well, so if you adjusted your alarm clock you’d need to adjust it again!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are 144hz screen possible?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The 60 rule is actually based on a 59.97 rule and it’s not really a rule, just a standard that stuck around. What’s better than 60? Two times 60! What’s better than two times 60? Four times sixty!

  With VRR you can run certain screens that get sold right now at exactly 91.3 fps if you want, it’s just extremely unpractical.

  CRT monitors actually used to run at higher refresh rates (120Hz CRTs came way before anything close to flat panels were introduced) but the shitty limitations of the first ten years of flat panels changed the way displays were used and marketed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no “EU” culture about any of this. Every country has its own culture and acceptable ideas. All I know is that you have to be made aware of any surcharges before they’re applied, but I’m pretty sure things work exactly the same in America.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d find random hospitality surcharges when you walk into a random restaurant in Amsterdam or Paris. What are you going to do, sue the restaurant? Call the cops? As much as I like living here, it’s not like this is some kind of utopia where scummy businesses don’t exist and where the government always enforces customer protection laws everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve only come across it in ex-Soviet European countries, but every country is different of course. Tourist traps also like adding fees and surcharges but I don’t think they do it for the same reason.

  I remember something about tipping bring associated with bribes getting mentioned in a documentary I watched years ago, but i can’t even begin to remember what documentary that was, let alone find a link to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think so, as long as the fee is made clear before getting the bill (e.g. indicated on the menus and signs outside). It’s definitely legal in Europe, assuming you were warned beforehand. It’s very common in some European countries (while entirely nonexistent in others).

  In countries where tipping isn’t traditionally acceptable (like in places where it’s associated with bribing), service surcharge often replace the tipping. Charging a service surcharge and then suggesting a tip is ridiculous though.

  I simply wouldn’t tip after that surcharge, but then again I’m European.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taking self-appreciation to the next level⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on the original article the guy left a trail of destruction. Clearly has no idea how to properly cut or maintain hedges.

  The original article mentions at least one address, and based on Streetview from two years ago I don’t get the impression that these people don’t maintain their hedges at all. There are clear signs of work having been done either by people who have been doing so for a while or by some kind of landscaping company.

  To me, this looks more like a “bored, grumpy old man destroys peoples’ hedges” story.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taking self-appreciation to the next level⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re going for some kind of moral victory, don’t kill the plant. Go to the council or whatever authority is relevant in your area and force the owners to take care of their shit through legal means. There’s probably some kind of accessibility law you can press to clear the curb of tree branches.

  Cutting up random people’s plants is an excellent way to run head first into tree law. Replacing these plants isn’t cheap. The guy did extensive damage to a bunch of hedges with no warning or communication beforehand, and got angry when approached.

  If you’re going to risk breaking tree laws, at least don’t put your name and picture in the news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gonna be a great day!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the idea behind decentralised currency and I value the ideals of those wanting to free themselves from the four or five financial institutions controlling the world, but the people who want to buy groceries with their Bitcoin are a tiny minority. Cryptocurrency has become a vessel for speculation, fraud, and money laundering, abusing the good intentions of its inventors.

  During the Bitcoin hype, some online stores actually started taking cryptocurrency as payment, but few stores still have that option available. For a sweet, short period there was a glimpse of hope for cryptocurrency, but that quickly collapsed.

  Your first point accentuates that there are too many options to transfer blockchain money for most normal people. Living in a place where payment terminals in supermarkets don’t accept credit cards (debit card based culture) and where banks decided to go with Maestro rather than Mastercard, I can tell you from experience that “you need to pay with a different thing here” will confuse the hell out of people.

  Your second point is actually the problem behind cryptocurrency that’ll make it impossible to use as a real currency. There are no control mechanisms, so the value jumps around wildly. You’d be smart to store your money through cryptocurrencies in countries with explosive inflation (Argentina, Turkey) but when a country’s currency starts to collapse, limits to exchanging money are often the first policies to get inflation back under control, so there’s a real risk you’ll end up unable to access your money because banks suddenly refuse to take your return transfer.

  Your third point is kind of invalidated by the fact you default to naming Lightning as your primary fast transaction mechanism, since it operates on Bitcoin which is stuck in the PoW world and probably always will be. It’s major competitor Ethereum is kind of okay these days, but gas prices make it useless for doing any real payments so you’ll end up using some kind of wrapper for that too.

  You can’t compare a form of government to a product, so I’m not sure what the democracy argument is about.

  And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures. How many of your real life friends and family have a Lemmy account compared to Facebook or Twitter? Even within my tech nerd bubble most people stick with mainstream services and mainstream operating systems. The best thing to happen to the Linux desktop was Valve picking it up and stuffing it into a console. Android deserves an honorable mention, but they way that got Linux into the mainstream was to hide Linux as much as possible. Twitter started collapsing and Bluesky and fucking Threads ate Mastodon’s lunch. The Fediverse sure has grown, but unless you’re into Linux or computers, you won’t find a Twitter or even Reddit alternative here.

  Even still, I myself can get my social media itch scratched by the Fediverse, but I still can’t pay for my groceries through Dogecoin or Lightning or Ethereum.

  There are also reasons why I’m not planning on using an iteration of cryptocurrency for real life finances even if such a thing becomes available. Most importantly, the public payment history associated with wallets. It’s not exactly difficult to link wallets to companies once they start operating at larger scales and soon enough you’ll have companies selling your payment history (and wage/employer history) straight off the blockchain. Unfortunately, that’s not really something that can be fixed with the current model.

  There’s also the theft problem: if someone steals my bank account details and uses it to transfer all of my money to a foreign country, my bank will lock down my account and probably call me. Steal my wallet seed phrase and everything is gone in an instant, with no recourse. This adds major risk to keeping any significant amount of money in cryptocurrency form, and both enthusiasts and professionals have lost millions upon billions this way.